For as long as I can remember, I have been a hopeless romantic. I cannot tell you how many high school boyfriends crushed my heart into a thousand tiny pieces because they didn’t arrange for Unchained Melodies to play over the loudspeakers during homeroom, or have a hundred roses sent at lunch or at the very least serenade my bedroom window. I have always had very high expectations.

Michael warned me early on that he was not a Valentines Day guy. He’s a spur-of-the-moment romantic guy, but he’s not a Valentines Day guy. If you were to play a word association game with him and you said, “Valentines Day”, his immediate reply would be, “Greeting card profits.” He says he doesn’t see the point of having a holiday that forces people to buy pink teddy bears and heart-shaped balloons but I think his distaste for the day has something to do with all the awful Valentines Days he spent in Los Angeles, when he worked in a restaurant that was such a hot V-spot you had to book your reservation a year in advance. All through the winter holidays, as February 14th crept closer, he’d get more and more tense. To him it wasn’t a holiday, it was The Worst Night Of The Year. It hung over his head like a guilty sentence hangs on an innocent man.

Needless to say our first couple of Valentines Days were rough. He’d work and I’d feel neglected. I’d pout, he’d get defensive. We’d argue, we’d make up, we’d move on. It took a few years but I eventually came to agree with Mike: Valentines Day is overrated and why on earth would anyone want to go out to dinner on the very night the entire rest of the country is going out to dinner? Besides, Mike’s spur-of-the-moment romance is a thousand times hotter than a pink teddy bear.

This year I had zero expectations for Valentines Day. We went wine tasting with friends the day before and the morning of Michael scrubbed the entire house while insisting that I stay in bed reading, so I was sure I’d had the nicest Valentines weekend a girl could dream of. Which is why I was surprised when I came home yesterday and found this:

Either Michael is more of a Valentines Day guy than he’s willing to admit, or Theo’s been having inappropriate thoughts about his human companions.